The film deals with an all-too-common narrative that crops up in the media only after it is too late, and even then is addressed with too little conviction: how the rot in the police system prevents justice from being done in the courtroom

Jolly LLB 2 is not a great film by any means, but its jollities pack a rare political punch

Subhash Kapoor’s latest film returns us to a character he first presented on screen in March 2013: the ambitious small-town lawyer whose failure to work the system suddenly ends up pitting him against it. In Jolly LLB 1, Arshad Warsi was Jagdish Tyagi, the guy from Meerut whose ham-handed attempt to get himself some publicity sets him up against Boman Irani’s scheming Rajpal, the sort of high-maintenance Delhi lawyer whose arrival causes a flutter of anticipation to run down the corridors of the court. In Jolly LLB 2, Tyagi (and Warsi) has been unceremoniously replaced by Jagdishwar Mishra, Akshay Kumar playing a Kanpur ka Kanyakubja Brahmin who finds himself doing battle with a slimy Lucknow legal mind called Pramod Mathur (Annu Kapoor).

Warsi’s 2013 Jolly was no saint — in fact, that was crucial to Kapoor’s imagining of an identifiable everyman: someone who didn’t have the luxury of purity, but picked his battles. But Akshay Kumar’s version is less bumbling and way more swag. The new film’s insistence on his being street-smart seems to be centred around the need to preserve something of Kumar’s heroic persona: he is the Kanpuria who can bluff his way into a sweeter deal, the lawyer who doesn’t have any trouble breaking the law, who doesn’t even think twice about lying outright to a needy woman when he thinks his need is greater. Which is fine until we are asked to simultaneously believe in him being a novice in the courtroom: not just when it comes to legal argument, but even in lawyerly etiquette.

Kapoor has never really been bothered by legal niceties like getting the law right. In the 2013 film as well as now, he merrily treats the reopening of a criminal case as a Public Interest Litigation. What he gets right in both films, though, is the depressing state of the Indian judicial system, as encapsulated in the dimly lit courtroom, presided over by the underwhelming and often overwhelmed Saurabh Shukla. The piles of files, the diminutive judge who thinks nothing of hiding under the table, the chaotic haatha-paii that is constantly threatening to break out under the very nose of Justice — none of this could be further from the oldschool Hindi movie adaalat of Awaara or even Damini.

We have had bleaker, more realistic takes on the present-day courtroom in Hansal Mehta’s Shahid and Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court. But Kapoor is going for a different register. For one, he seems interested in holding up the irascible and eccentric Justice Tripathi (Saurabh Shukla recycling his act from the 2013 film) as a sort of metaphor for the judiciary: he is down but not yet out. His rotund frame and preoccupied manner may make him a figure of fun, but when it comes to the crunch, he manages to imbue the proceedings with authority.

But again the tone is uneven. The filmmaker claims a self-conscious departure from the grand histrionics of old by having Justice Tripathi dismissing Jolly’s high drama in his courtroom with a perfunctory “Sunny Deol kyun ban rahe ho?” And yet the film — and Justice Tripathi — seem quite willing to entertain high drama when it comes to the actual case at hand: an investigation into a police ‘encounter’ that wasn’t one.

This sort of choppiness in terms of both characterisation and tone does not prevent Jolly LLB 2 from being a politically courageous film whose broadstrokes humour might just succeed in getting across its message to a large audience. The encounter in the film is unpacked as the custodial murder of an innocent man for the unfortunate mistake of sharing his first name with a terrorist. He is deliberately mis-identified by a corrupt policeman so that the real accused can make good his escape, having paid a tidy sum to the policeman in question.

As in his first film, Kapoor deals here categorically with an all-too-common narrative that crops up in the media only after it is too late, and even then is often addressed with too little conviction: how the rot in the police system prevents justice from being done in the courtroom.

And here Jolly LLB 2 goes even further. It pits the “deshdrohi” terrorist against the policeman who has taken a “matribhoomi ki shapath”, thus reproducing the discourse of ‘anti-national’ versus ‘nationalist’ that the BJP has successfully made the discourse of the country’s drawing rooms and chai shops. But it then uses two powerfully understandable devices — Kashmir and police corruption — to show us how hollow this supposed binary is. The film’s message is so simple as to be obvious: the Muslim is not a terrorist until proven to be so; and the policeman is not a nationalist until proven to be so. But Kapoor must absolutely be applauded for delivering it.

■ Trisha Gupta Takes weekly stock of what's in and out at the movies

■ What Kapoor gets right in both films is the depressing state of the Indian judicial system, as encapsulated in the dimly lit courtroom, presided over by the underwhelming and often overwhelmed Justice Tripathi

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